William McDougall

1871-1938 · British · Social Psychology

The human mind has certain innate tendencies which are the essential springs of all thought and action.

William McDougall was, for a generation, one of the most eminent psychologists in the English-speaking world. His Introduction to Social Psychology (1908) went through edition after edition and founded a whole field; it grounded social life in a definite endowment of human instincts, each with its own primary emotion. Against the associationism he had inherited and the behaviorism that was rising, he built "hormic" psychology — a psychology of purpose, of striving toward goals, of the mind as an active, goal-seeking agent rather than a mechanism worked from outside.

Topics William McDougall addresses

• the theory of instincts
• hormic psychology
• the primary emotions
• the sentiments
• the self-regarding sentiment
• purposive striving
• the group mind
• the national mind and character
• the crowd
• social psychology
• eugenics
• racial hereditarianism
• the inheritance of ability
• the rise and decay of civilizations
• animism
• interactionist dualism
• the defense of the soul
• mind-body interaction
• Lamarckism
• the inheritance of acquired characteristics
• the water-maze experiments
• the anti-instinct revolt
• character and the sentiments
• parapsychology

Converse with William McDougall on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in William McDougall's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.